Look, folks, the ATF and FBI and Chicago Police and First Responders can’t do all the work of prevention… so it is time for citizens to step up, speak up, and speak out, and do so every day, with as much force as it takes to counter what has been going on ever since the weather started to warm up around here.

OK, people, time to take back the streets that are YOUR streets, in YOUR communities! These are the places you bought and built to raise your families in, to plant your gardens in, and to have a place to sit down to dinner or on your porch after work and enjoy the privileges of working hard, paying taxes, and living in America.

Time to show those gang people and gun and drug runners that, simply put and stated, THEY ARE NOT WELCOME!

You have to show that forcefully and physically when necessary. Do you know of someone with illegal guns or sources of them? TURN THEM IN! Know someone running drugs? TURN THEM IN! SNITCH ALREADY!

And quit calling it “snitching”- that’s so negative and so childish. These are not video games where people get a second chance to come back. Once someone is shot, THEY ARE SHOT, and they are in pain and wounded and could be dead. This is not some pixelated stuff someone puts on a screen; these are real people in the line of fire and in harm’s way.

And they are innocent children who are in some sort of area labeled “gang turf”. What? WHAT KIND OF SILLINESS IS THAT? GANG TURF? Indeed! Blame the media for continually talking about our communities in this manner. The more we allow the media to talk about “gang turf” or “gang violence” or “gang related” or “shootings” every day the more power they are giving to the gangs. Just talking about the problems is not going to do anything; there must be action. And right now.

That turf, that land, was the land of law -abiding American citizens before some idiots who are part of a gang decided to bring their unwelcome crop of drugs, guns, prostitution and other crimes into the area and begin to terrorize people with guns, graffiti and threats. YOU DARE THREATEN? Well then the people who have to endure your stuff can fight back.

There is strength in numbers; we can fight back. Use Biblical methods if necessary – come at the interlopers with sticks and stones, beat them out of the neighborhood. Ostracize them as though they have some kind of contagious disease. Tell them their drugs are not needed or wanted around there, and to move on. GET OUT OF HERE! Shout it right in their ear if need be, and come at them and drive them off the corners with your two -by -fours drawn and ready to beat the life out of them.

“That’s good riddance for all you have done in this area, you nasty gang banger! Get off my street and leave the kids alone! GO AWAY and DON’T COME BACK! EVER!”

Do whatever you must to show them that they are nothing but flies that can easily be swatted away and sprayed with bug killer. The killer is the lack of interest you can show for what they are offering.

Conquer your needs for drugs and violence! You can do better if you are depending on the drugs and the means of escape that are so violent and useless; you don’t need to encounter others and life in those ways. Drugs do no good for you- they can be deadly, they can cause you to hallucinate, to lose sleep, to lose appetite, to become very sick, and to become abusive. Violence is not necessary, either against yourself (needles, drugs, alcoholism, fighting) or against others (abuse, fighting, shouting, terrorism, prostitution), so turn the heat on those who have seen fit to turn the heat up in your communities.

When those who have suffered realize who has been fueling their suffering, they will wake up and realize, “Hey, I can do something about this. I can choose other ways and methods and means of feeling better, of taking daily life, of living with my family and of being a productive citizen. I don’t have to be treated like a loser… and those drug people are seeing me as vulnerable, a target. I CAN TAKE CHARGE! And I don’t need those drugs anymore!”

Once you understand that the drugs only offer short -term effects and are terribly expensive, and illegal, and can get you into deep trouble, you will no longer turn to the gangs. You can free yourself from their grip, and you can help free someone else from their poisons and toxins. You can turn away, and that’s the best approach of all. You can show them, “I don’ t need you, and our families don’t need you either, so get out and get lost!”

Besides, gang people are nothing but cowards. Who else would engage in drive -by shootings, wear dark clothes or masks, make silent signs, and deal stealthily on street corners? They are cowards, I say again, and cowards do not deserve anything but to be driven out of the community and consigned to solitary confinement and wandering in the deserts of their own dementia and troubles, as punishment for the troubles they have inflicted on others.

Gangs, go away. We are tired of you! Let me emphasize, along with the Mayor, with the police department, and with the families, with all the first responders who have to see the tragedies and who are put in danger every day, and with all of us who are tired of the “if it bleeds it leads” headlines, WE ARE TIRED OF YOU GANG PEOPLE! Keep your junk and your online arguments and your other behavioral problems to yourselves already.

The Mayor is fed up and who can blame him – who wants to have to talk with families when their children are caught in the crossfire of gangs who feel the need to take their junk out to the streets and terrorize others? And since this can plainly be called terrorism- that’s right, gangs promote TERRORISM and don’t forget that – now the Feds have to step in and see what they can do to reduce the violence. The gang people need to be rounded up, arrested, and thrown into jail with the key thrown away. The time for talking with them is done, the time for patiently waiting for them to reform is over, long over. We are sick of them, we are tired of them, we are fed up with them and we want them out.

Far as I am concerned, the mayor and the governor need to call out the National Guard, SWAT, and whomever else can help solve the problems, to take control and bring order to the streets again and be there till the gang people realize that they are not going to get any more ground and that their efforts are wasted, their battles are lost, their resources are not going to match up, and that they may as well dry up and blow away like chaff in the winds of change.

We have been taught, very much programmed, to think on the run, to be rushed and hurried, to anticipate and to expect… and somehow, to stress out.

Then there are the methods people have come up with to reduce the stress that we seem to expect from daily life. There are spiritual practices, which for Buddhists are part of daily life, and there are drugs, and there is yoga, and there are massages, and there are exercises, and there are those who say “tune it out and just get on with things”.

What else is there? Answer the question: What causes “stress” in the first place for many people? Stress seems to be the result of what happens when expectations do not measure up with results; then our minds spend hours analyzing, thinking, chewing on what went wrong (more often than what went right), and losing sleep and losing our appetites because we expected or anticipated one result and another one showed up.

What can we do then that might reduce our dependence on short -term coping methods such as drugs by the expensive dose –load, or massages that temporarily flush our bodies of pain and suffering and lactic acid?

We can learn to take life naturally, and not place such a high, “set in stone” priority on expecting or anticipating. For daily life can be seen rather as a baseball game.

In baseball, every at bat is different, every inning and every game will be different. Your team can play the same team three days in a row and the results will be attained in different ways. You might have the same line –ups, but the pitchers will not be the same and the weather conditions will not be the same. The ball will carry differently depending on the winds; the turf will be different, the plays will be fielded differently.

The managers can “expect” a play to go a certain way but what if it does not? What happens then – stress. The pitcher wanted a strike called but the umpire called the pitch a ball; so much for the strikeout. A batter wants to launch a home run but instead gets under the ball and hits a long out. Well, the hit might advance a runner or it might be the third out of the inning.

As is baseball, so is life. We might go to the same bus stop we do each weekday for our trip in to the shop. We might get there about the same time each day but the bus might be late by a few minutes due to construction, a fire, or a crash that causes a reroute. When we get to work we might expect some colleague to show up but perhaps they do not, so part of the day’s plan might not be done, or lunches might be cut short because the staff has fewer people.

Some people say it is not good to lower expectations, but considering the effects stress has on the body, not setting so much on expecting something might be the best thing we can do save for treat ourselves when we have done something good at the office or had a very successful week or done some kind of community service. It is useless to anticipate what will happen; anticipation is the companion of worry, and worry does no good.

We can also learn to “mind less”. When we mind too much, we continue thinking about every little thing that happens, every person that comes and goes, every gesture, everything, and getting the small stuff too much in our minds causes just as much worry as anticipation and expectation. We can indeed have “too much on our minds”. In this age of too much information, we have to learn to do more than merely “tune out” what is not relevant or important. We have to change our thinking on not only how much information we need and is necessary, but on those who say we need to pay so much attention to the information provided. Thank goodness for the mute button and the OFF switch.

Each day presents opportunities to be fresh and new regarding what will happen. You have heard the idea of “open mind”; that is basically another way of saying “Be natural”. Let things happen as they will; if the bus comes a couple minutes late, it comes a couple minutes late. If someone does not show up on time or at all, arrange lunches with the staff members that show up. It is polite, if you happen to be late because of a transit situation, to tell someone why you were late or what happened, and get to your position as soon as possible so the day can carry on.

Do not let your job run you; YOU control your work and your interactions with customers. You say who is next and attend to the person you are assisting. Patience on all sides is a virtue, but you have the hand when in a sales situation. You might expect something to happen but if it does not, that energy is wasted in the anticipation of selling something, seeing someone, hearing something or experiencing something. Here is where the idea of the open mind is useful. Once you are at the workplace, ascertain things when you arrive. Do not anticipate ANYTHING; plans can change on a moment’s notice and situations can pop up.

There could be a storm, a building evacuation, a car crashing into the building, a fire or a swarm of bees that lands on the bridge near where you work. The boss could be in a great mood or he could be in a foul mood. The vice –president could be ready with her plan or she might put it off because there has been an event in her family that requires her attention away from the company. Though you cannot anticipate happenings such as those above or know what to do in such cases until someone else informs you, there can be some kind of “Plan B” at the firm for when someone cannot follow through with what is supposed to be on the day’s agenda.

You can find something else to do- there is always work to be done at many businesses. You can find ways to be helpful or find something to learn. Or if things just aren’t going to go as the day’s schedule mandated, you might just go back home. Who knows? If that swarm of bees hangs around you might just have to “telecommute”!

Anticipation, expectation, and worry are three little demons that afflict many people around the world and are major sources of “stress”. But each day brings chances to start with a clean slate, to meet the day free of thoughts of “what might happen”. Each day brings the bridges, but you will not know how to cross the bridges till you come to them.

You come up to the bridge and look at the situation. What is going on? Is the bridge intact and thus can be walked across with ease on sturdy supports? Is there a flood that has washed out the bridge so that it cannot be passed? What are the conditions? You cannot know until you see the situation and find out how then to deal with it.

The recent disasters of this year could be turned into a song, a poem, a newscast, and they have been in name and number rolling off the tongues of reporters and residents since the Boston Marathon bombing and its after -effects.

There were the terrible fires in California with the extremely dry conditions there; there was the wayward officer who had parts of California on edge for days, and now nature has taken over yet again.

Well, I have one thing to say to the celebrities of our nation: GET UP AND START DOING YOUR PART NOW! What do I mean exactly? It is this: the hard -working people of these cities and towns have paid good money to see your shows and your movies, millions of dollars paid in to see these events. Your kids then can go to posh and super -uber private schools, be dressed in expensive clothes and shoes by nannies and supervised in the breakfast room by British butlers. Now your kids can have the very best, so shouldn’t the people who have supported your elaborate lifestyles expect something from you?

I do not mean putting on the music shows for the benefit of you getting some photo opportunity or your name in the paparazzi press and top headlines in the magazines. Why not just get out there and contribute by putting in some elbow grease and telling the camera people and your agents to leave the celebrity stuff behind for once. Act like the ordinary citizens you really are anyway, and put on the cleanup gear. Get out the leather gloves and the jeans, the heavy boots and the hats, the plain shirts and the water bottles and the sack lunches and get alongside those who are right now searching the rubble of Moore, Cleburne, and Granbury and other parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and maybe now even parts of Arkansas, Kansas, and Tennessee. Severe weather also moved through Illinois and Missouri and Iowa.

So you celebrities and American royalty who are not making your presence known, go ahead and take the chance. Put aside the glitz, bling, glimmer and shine of the stage, the fancy clothes, the designer gowns and the lights and the pricey jewelry. Get right alongside the folks who have supported your careers by buying the magazines, the CDs, the DVDs, the music videos, the ring tones and the designer lines of sheets, clothes, shoes and furnishings for the home and office.

Get in there! Get into the soup kitchens and make cauldrons of soup, pans of bread, saucepans of vegetables, sandwiches for the first responders, and bowls of Jello and pudding for the kids. Go into the hospitals and help the chaplains; go in and pray for the survivors, and go to the bedsides of the children to bring them stuffed animals, books, art supplies or other toys.

The people are out there and you should be too if you have the time and energy. Bring your hands out there; there are people who need all the help the nation can give right now. There are lives to rebuild, homes to reconstruct, communities to bring back to life, wounds to heal and lives to reconnect.

In the Northern Hemisphere we can see some stunning celestial objects; we can witness meteor showers and fantastic bolides and we can see rings around the sun and moon, which are caused by light reflecting from cirrus clouds (made of ice crystals). We can see planets, stars, and arms of our home galaxy; depending on our lighting and pollution conditions we can see dim stars, star colors, the Milky Way and the nearest galaxy to our own, Andromeda.

As children if we are fortunate we have telescopes and excellent binoculars with which to see the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the features on our Moon, and with proper filter protection, solar prominences and sunspots. We can pick out some of the better known constellations and asterisms, such as Orion and the Summer Triangle.

However, many of the sights people can witness in the celestial realm are seen only in the Southern Hemisphere. Certain supernovae for instance have been seen only from that part of the Earth, and some of the best dark skies in the world are in that hemisphere.

Wouldn’t it be great if the nations of the Southern Hemisphere engaged in eco-friendly peacetime deals and stopped their wars based on religion and grabbing power, in tearing down the forests and destroying the land? There is so much to marvel at and ponder if only the people of Indonesia, India, Africa and South America would lay down their weapons and quell their anger and just take time to gaze into the skies on clear nights.

What would they see? They certainly would see sights on a grand scale, such as we can see here if we are lucky.

Americans are learning the benefits of having regions devoted to dark-sky observation, freed from development and away from the lights of big cities and industry. We know that reducing the amount of artificial light that enters our windows at night is beneficial for our health, but we still need street lights that are designed and efficient enough to direct light down instead of up and out. Better lighting would reduce greatly the amount of that awful “light pollution” that clouds the skies even dozens of miles away from cities.

Thus in areas with fewer cities and developments, such as are seen in some parts of the Southern Hemisphere, just think of the benefits the peoples could draw in by catering to people who want to see wonderful dark-sky conditions. Eco-tourism is growing in popularity, and there would be nothing better for some overworked city dweller to come to a quiet, dark, calm place, and get out there under the sparkling show of a velvety black panorama.

There would be globular clusters, galaxies, planets, stars, meteor showers, the spiral arms of our Milky Way; there would be constellations and comets to grace the eyes and the brains of astute viewers. What a place to hold a Messier Marathon an area such as India, Micronesia, Australia, Indonesia, and Easter Island would be!

What else would the peoples of the Southern Hemisphere see? Branch out for a moment from talk of the skies and the planets and think about what they would see in others and in themselves. They would see other human beings just as they are, they would see families and young children yearning for a chance to have peace and quiet and grow up in a place free from constant noise and lights for security and weapons discharging and waste ruining the streets and the atmosphere. They would see people yearning for freedom to enjoy nights in the countryside with their relatives; they would see people wanting time on their front porches to watch the meteors or watch the progression of the planets as their ancestors did centuries ago.

They would see more than a resource for bringing in serious bucks and for preserving their natural environments; they would see each other.

Galaxies in our own right are we humans; with so many parts but within each individual, within each person there are opportunities, there are chances and there is potential. We are stardust each one of us; we are made of the universal elements born in supernovae. Our common beginning is up there and around us, in the cosmos, in the evolving universe, and in the stars our destiny is happening every second.

We can take notice of each other and with clear heads we can look up and help others do the same. Take the time, turn off the lights, go outside, be quiet, relax and breathe, and just look up.

The more we talk, the more the situations and violence, gang rule and drug issues will continue; talk is not action in the best sense of the word. Actual effort and getting to the job and doing the work is what matters once the talk is done. Talk up a storm; the gangs and criminals will keep working right on through those storms. Legislate, get together and “look into” the situations, send people out to “take a look at” the “neighborhoods” and then “make a report on their findings”. Keep right on doing the “studies”, and all you do is just as helpful as trying to find cures for cancer when the solution is to get rid of the chemicals that cause the diseases in the first place.

You can get rid of at least some of the guns and you can be rid of stock in gun makers and any support of gun manufacturers and those who put on the shows where background checks are not necessary. That means, as many officials have observed, that anyone can go to those shows and get any sort of gun they want.

Guns do not kill people; people kill people – that is the saying. It is true. But on to the rest of the topic………

Now the main issues is about “guns”… well, there are all kinds of what we can class as “firearms”. There is the .22, there is the Bushmaster, there is the cannon one of our neighbors used to fire off every July 4 from his front lawn. He would dress in period costume and shoot that cannon off right on schedule. Guns have been around for centuries, and they have basically one use and purpose. These weapons are, as any weapons are, meant to inflict harm, injury, damage and death, quickly and with pain. Death is never “instantaneous” and video games can in this respect be misleading to those who play them.

The idea that death comes to a human being as it does on a video game screen is ridiculous. Even using the most potent drugs, death comes in seconds or minutes, and the person so in harm and inflicted will feel something before the final moments arrive and vital functions cease. In the same idea, using a weapon loaded with dozens or hundreds of rounds is not going to bring death any faster; it will just make the plight of the dying more painful and just plain awful.

So we talk about the gun, and just think of how many varieties there are. As mentioned above there is the simple hand gun many people purchase for home or business defense, the service weapon law enforcement officials carry to their jobs every day as they defend our cities and borders, and the machine guns or “assault” weapons our miliary and SWAT teams use in their daily work. The latter have those high potency magazines these personnel need to discharge their jobs as they can be in hazardous territories where their opponents are armed with such things.

Lately in these gun turn -in events and gun buy -back events, someone turned in a missile launcher and at another event a rocket launcher. I wonder why someone would even want these anywhere near them or their families or neighbors, even as collectors items. I know people who have rid their homes of all weapons, no matter their value, and they feel better for being rid of these implements of destruction.

In an episode of EMERGENCY, a real nail -biter, the paramedics and fire department respond to a man injured when a weapon malfunctions and the round ends up inside of him. Dr. Brackett has to come out and perform emergency surgery on the man in the man’s own back yard as it is too dangerous for him to be moved. The bomb squad has to be called, and the responders note that the man has enough guns in his collection to start a war. Thus the man’s negligence ends up putting many more people in danger – the responders, his wife, his neighbors and friends. Now many people do not have collections that elaborate or potent, but I do know people who have home collections of firearms. I never felt safe around those homes; if people do not know how to properly maintain their weapons they either need to learn or get rid of them. The popular television show EMERGENCY! is about forty years old now but many of the episodes are relevant to issues going on today, and they are worth watching.

The NRA claims that the proposed bans on assault weapons will ruin our Second Amendment rights, but it will do no such thing at all. The ban is on one particular class of firearm, those meant to discharge dozens of rounds a second or a minute and inflict mass serious harm in schools, crowds, malls and the like. These guns end up in the wrong hand much of the time; I can see no need for such guns as a method of recreation.

There are better ways to have recreation, or if you would rather term it, RE -CREATION. Thinking of taking leisure in the view of the latter pronunciation might give you a different view of using high – powered machine -style guns at all, specially for hunting or for some other purpose of causing harm or pain on a living thing.

There is also the issue of mental illness and debating how it should be judged on that basis who should or should not have guns. Who has the right to judge in the first place, considering that everyone is to some degree mentally unstable. No one is what could be called “normal”, and at any rate who can judge or say what “normal” is. Everyone is so different, “diverse”, and individual that nothing is “normal”. There are those who are educated to discern “mental illness” and the degrees thereof, and volumes have been written on the varieties of mental disorders for centuries. We diagnose, treat, observe, maintain, and educate on mental disorders; but when it comes to referencing mental illness with the right to own a firearm, those who are legislating and asking for views from others must be careful. As far as we are able, we must be as a good judge should be: impartial, a good listener, not biased to one or another side or view or opinion, and patient enough to note the views of everyone who is participating in any organized debate on the issue.

The issues revolving (pardon the use of that word) around gun violence, gun control, law enforcement and FOIA cards and gun possession are complex, difficult, and hard to deal with. But deal with them we must as has been pointed out hundreds of times since the Sandy Hook massacre.

And now this week we hear of a bus driver in Alabama that was shot and killed by a man who then abducted a child from that bus. That idiot, that angry, that awful man terrorized others and refuses now to give up the child despite that he is sick and has called for his parents. I hope that the situation can be ended by non -violence but if it cannot then the assailant brought it down on himself; let us all hope the child will emerge safely from his prison and be happily reunited with his family.

Guns? Do we need them at all? Does anyone need them? To what degree do we need them around our homes and businesses?

Deep questions, and we must ask, ponder, think on and solve each one of them.